Microsoft hope it will bring the internet, mobile phone and PC closer together. But reviews have so far been mixed, although reviewers have been limited to trying the (pre-beta version).
The full version is expected to be capable of working with a touchscreen screen, navigating documents and the Web similar to Apple's iPhone. It is officially released at the end of 2009.
To its credit Nokia has finally produced a decent email client. Nokia has, for a long time, included email in some form or another on its S60 phones, but the new Nokia Messaging brings all the important elements together into one very easy-to-use application. Setting up a new account is as simple as punching in your account details (in most cases). Business email through MS Exchange requires a few extra bits of info, like your email domain and server, but is likewise very easy to set up and use. The E75 is capable of supporting one Exchange account and up to 10 private email accounts simultaneously, with new messages pushed to your handset as soon as they are delivered to your email server.
Everything else is as expected. There's a nice range of business tools like a PDF reader and QuickOffice, and a barely noteworthy range of media software. The image gallery is fast to browse, but when we tested the video player we found it supported only a small selection of the files we tested, playing 3GP and WMV files. Interestingly, the E75 is also the first E-Series phone to support Nokia's N-Gage gaming platform.
Processing is excellent, jumping in and out of different menus and accessing the various apps is punchy and without visible lag. Opening the slider turns the screen to landscape view mode and even this transition is quick enough so that you never feel like you're waiting for the phone to catch up with you.
Battery life is the let-down. In fact, let-down is too soft a term to use for our experience. The E75 comes with a 1000mAh battery, which is only two-thirds the capacity of the battery in the E71. Charging the phone to full and activating push email for one MS Exchange account and one infrequently used private account was enough to drain the battery in less than 24 hours. If you're in the habit of charging your phone overnight you'll find it back on the charger each evening, otherwise you'll find the phone powers down before you get home. Worse still, the on-screen battery monitor is tremendously flawed — we've found the battery dropping from full to empty with very little notice, the middle bars of the display barely get a look in.
The saving grace is the profile switcher that lives as a shortcut on the Active Standby Bar by default. This switcher activates a second phone profile that can be completely customised with new wallpapers, ringtones and themes, and with different active email accounts. You can have, for example, your MS Exchange account on one profile, and your Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail on the other. We've found when we switched the profile to the second profile with no push email active that the battery lasted an extra day or two.
The KF510 incorporates a slider mechanism. It works fine but for practical purposes it can be a bummer. There are no ridges – that is to say, the front is absolutely flat and this hampers an easy slide. Often you will be reduced to pressing down on the front, maybe even the screen, to get it to move up. This is a pity – the phone is a fingerprint magnet to begin with, and secondly it's enough to cause the phones to start creaking soon.Another problem is that the upward slide is facilitated with a bulk of the phone kept on the portion sliding up, rather than down. It’s more like the phone is sliding down than up, making the slide pretty heavy.
Apart from the sliding glitch, I think the phone looks pretty useable and snazzy. The lower portion houses the coolest bit – the touch-sensitive keys. The whole pad is made up of many dancing lights that flicker from one end to another every time you touch the navigation keys, which are also touch-sensitive. The call/cancel and the two open keys are also on the touchpad.
For good measure, the phone incorporates a lock slider on the right, which is the mainstay in getting your phone to unlock – or to get to the home screen. Every time you need to access the menu while you are on a call, you will need to press the camera/MP3 button. Also, you will more-or-less need to touch your chin to the touchpad while talking. Hence, while talking the touchpad will be out of use as a rule, unless you press the camera/MP3 button located right below the lock slider.
The phone is targeted at the budget bracket and doesn’t really offer much more than its competitors. That doesn’t mean there’s little to talk about. For one, it comes custom-fitted with LG’s proprietary UI. Another USP is the handset's sparkling look and feel – the kind you can flaunt in clubs and have people assume it costs twice what it’s actually worth!
In keeping with the thrust on fashion, the themes have been upped, much to my liking. Thanks to haptics, the phone vibrates with every move. You can customize the vibration to make it strong, soft or medium. The screen is a highly reflective 2.2-inch TFT that can display up to 256K colors (240 x 320 pixels).
There’s nothing else that's radically new. The phone supports EDGE and GPRS (no 3G though). The settings are a bit wonky, so beware if you are one to manually key in the GPRS settings. Some operators like BPL and Trump don’t even have the settings for this phone yet.
It’s interesting to see how the focus of companies differs when launching the same handset in different parts of the world. While its launch in 2008 focussed on the handset’s camera and incredible output, the India launch showcases its multimedia experience pegging the handset as a ‘mobile entertainer’…perhaps realising that not many in India will buy a handset only for its picture taking ability. Indians may want more value for their rupee and focussing on the ‘completeness’ of the handset as a multimedia instrument may find more takers.
“Samsung Pixon is made for users who want to experience the best multimedia entertainment on their mobile phone with the ease of a touch. Right from enjoying music and videos on the 8.1cm wide full touch screen, to high quality image and video capturing, to sharing them with their friends and family, Samsung Pixon offers consumers the real benefit of mobile entertainment,” said Sunil Dutt, Country Head, Samsung Telecom Division.
Plus, no mention of the website - The Photographic Adventures of Nick Turpin that was promulgated in its 2008 launch.
Samsung Pixon is also ideal for enthusiastic gamers as it comes pre-embedded with a host of popular games like Brain Challenge, Diamond Twister and Millionaire-3. Apart from these, users can also enjoy the motion-sensor based game - Tumbling Dice.
Priced at an around MRP of Rs. 28,000.
Besides some quirks and strange choices, the Nokia 5800 is actually a nice phone. Calls sounded good, and battery life was strong. The phone has solid music, video, Web browsing and GPS features, and even though none of these are exceptional, they're all robust and quite capable compared to other multimedia phones out there. On the other hand, we had hoped to see a more polished interface design, better camera and an overall multimedia performance that could match the N series smartphones, but it seems like we'll have to wait and see if the Nokia N97 can work some real magic there. In our opinion, Nokia also needs some new ideas about finger controls. Attaching two different styli to the phone just won't cut it, especially when remembering that Windows phones with only one stylus attached are already in trouble. Release: March 2009. Price: $320.
